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Big law firms basically froze hiring for a few years, smaller firms weren't doing great, jobs were hard to come by, those you could get didn't pay any better than other jobs, and huge percentage of law school graduates more or less gave up. So right now there's a huge demographic gap where you have partners in their 50s and associates in their 20s and early 30s and few people in between to do all the senior associate stuff. It's not exactly catastrophic, but it's not a position the firms want to be in again if they can help it.
Ah, that makes more sense. I've heard similar complaints from friends at Boeing about a lack of employees between 30 and 60 years old.
A similar thing happened with Millennials and the skilled trades/manufacturing. The '08 recession wrecked those sectors and in the absence of opportunity people went elsewhere, i.e. to college. As a then-student in the early 2010s who was handy with cars I worked with a guy (mechanical engineering major who was a significantly better mechanic than I) who'd quit his entry-level automotive job because slinging pizzas for Papa John's paid quite a bit better than being an apprentice mechanic, in addition to being a much easier job.
One of my uncles is a tradesman (a painter) and spent the early 2010s so broke that his wife and children occasionally lacked electricity. It was such that I emptied my wallet (We're talking like 50 bucks here.), and left it in the bed they'd let me sleep in during a visit (He'd have never taken a dime if I offered it to them, not even as a Christmas gift.). My uncle called me a few days later mentioning the money and I told him "Merry Christmas". It was the least I could do, and I wish I'd been in a position to do more.
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